masak writes: The developers of Rakudo, an actively developed implementation of Perl 6, give you their first "Rakudo Star" release. Quoting the announcement: 'These "Star" releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.' It's been a long wait, and not everything is in place yet, but Perl 6 is definitely feeling less vapor-y today.

Denny writes: "Perl is Alive has published a 'six months later' analysis of a Perl ecommerce project which used the popular Catalyst framework at its core. It's a well-written look at how, by choosing various components from CPAN, you can build up a complex custom-tailored system without having to write everything end-to-end yourself. The author concludes that they would "undoubtedly" make the same technology decisions again, given the success of this project, and the quality of 'modern' Perl libraries and frameworks which are now available from CPAN."